The primary object of this Core Facility is to support research projects that can benefit from access to expertise and instrumentation for protein/peptide identification and characterization and also to some limited extent for oligonucleotide characterization. The resource center aids the researchers to further their understanding of the structure, function and identity of proteins and peptides using a wide variety of established and emerging techniques. Key instruments are a protein/peptide sequencer, several HPLC units, several classical chromatography units and a MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer. The following services are offered: Protein sequence analysis of samples in solution or in a el slice; protein modification and fragmentation, such as disulfide cleavage and alkylation, CNBr and enzymatic cleavage; protein or peptide separation, isolation and characterization by HPLC, classical chromatography and many types of affinity chromatography; identification of disulfide bonding pattern, mass-spectrometric analysis of molecular weight, heterogeneity, post-translational modification and for the purpose of protein de-novo identification and synthetic peptide quality control. The protein core facility has in recent time acquired an especially important role in implementing and performing Proteomics-related procedures for the identification of a wide variety of proteins and peptides from a large number of sources; for this purpose samples on 2D gels are digested in situ weights in a mass spectrometer; the recorded data are then searched against an appropriate databank. The costs for performing the various procedures that can directly be identified with individual research project are carried by those projects. However, the costs for developing procedures and for analytical controls are carried by the core facility.